county writers

A couple entries back I mentioned that I had gone to an art gallery to hear some local writers read their work. I woke up this morning thinking about that gathering and how some of the stories and poems have stuck with me.

One of the first stories was by a young woman and it was about a proctologist who was going to become famous because his patient - the guy who kept ingesting bigger and bigger objects - was getting famous and he'd be sort of riding his patient's coat tails. It was truly a creative story line and really well written.

One woman wrote about her neighbors out in the desert who lived amongst junk and who starved and abused animals and kids and how that, and their trash blowing onto her land, affected her. She told another story of having moved out west because she fell in love with a cowboy. She had images in her stories that I wish I would've come up with, how she was losing her love of the monsoons because now she merely associated the rains with muddy boot tracks across the kitchen floor.

The poets read as though they were doing performance pieces, especially my friend who used to dance professionally. I've never enjoyed listening to poetry as much as I did this day. I kept flashing back to the beat generation, people gathering in coffee houses to hear the beats read. I wondered if they still held poetry slams in Portland.

The young guy who was recording the readings got up and read a couple of his poems and he had me laughing so hard I was crying. Oh my god! I need to see the poems on paper because there was too much to keep track of - something about goldfish with AK47s.

The last person to read was a crotchety old hippie dude who wanted to pick a fight with a guy in the audience because he didn't have on shoes and the old dude said that was disrespectful to him. They almost got into it right there in the gallery. When the crotchety dude got up to read he said he wasn't a writer but he thought he'd write something for this event and he pulled out a few crumply pieces of paper and read a story about a woman he had fallen in love with and had agreed to meet out west only one of the loose ends she had to tie up happened to be a husband. He was distraught over this turn of events and one night God came to him and he said he was pretty surprised at the way God looked because she was only about 4 feet tall with kinky black hair and she was Italian. Just the way he read it had my friend and I once again crying with laughter.

Afterwards when my friend and I went to have beers with the queers (after all, it was Pride Day), we kept laughing over the proctologist and those goldfish with the AK47s and God as a little Italian lady. When stories stick with you like that, you know they're good ones.